JanSport - Fashion Company Profile
JanSport is the Seattle-born backpack brand founded in 1967 by Murray Pletz, Jan Lewis and Skip Yowell - the brand named for Jan Lewis, whose sewing built the first packs - and a VF Corporation brand since 1986, still making the backpacks, bags and totes it has always been known for.
Company Snapshot
- Status
- Operating - the backpack, bags and totes brand of VF Corporation, selling through retailers, its own site and marketplaces worldwide
- Type
- Brand of VF Corporation (NYSE: VFC), which acquired JanSport in 1986
- Headquarters
- Denver, Colorado, United States (VF Corporation headquarters)
- Founded
- 1967, in Seattle, Washington, by Murray Pletz, Jan Lewis and Skip Yowell
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Company Profile
JanSport remains part of VF Corporation, the parent described in the record below; VF is headquartered in Denver, Colorado, where its outdoor brand teams, including JanSport, were consolidated. The short record below is kept on this single page beside the current snapshot, with its photograph. Current packs, colours and prices are on JanSport's own site, linked above; the shop box covers JanSport products sold through Amazon and eBay.
The product list is deliberately plain - backpacks, bags and totes - because the brand's argument is not variety of category but quality of carrying. A pack is the one piece of outdoor equipment that touches everything else you own: it holds the layers, the food, the books and the tools, and it does so against your back for hours. JanSport's filing frames that job in two words, functional and stylish, and the order matters. Function comes first in the sentence and in the design brief; style is what makes the functional object welcome on a city street as well as a trail.
Part of VF Corporation
JanSport is a division of VF Corporation, and historical descriptions give the parent its full billing: VF Corp is a multi-billion dollar apparel powerhouse, with an incredibly diverse, international portfolio of fashion brands and products that reach consumers wherever they choose to shop. That sentence explains what a specialist bag brand gains from a giant parent - distribution, sourcing and a portfolio of sibling brands - while JanSport keeps the narrow focus that made its name. The VF route carried on this page leads to the parent company's own filing in this directory, in the V letter.
Read the two filings together and the structure of modern apparel comes into focus. At one end sits a corporation whose products reach consumers wherever they choose to shop; at the other sits a single product family - the pack on your back - refined over more than four decades of outdoor use. JanSport's identity survives inside the portfolio precisely because it is so specific: nobody confuses a backpack specialist with the parent that owns it, and the filing's pride in the outdoor enthusiast, from peak to park, is a specialist's pride rather than a conglomerate's.
Common Questions
Who owns JanSport now?
VF Corporation (NYSE: VFC), which acquired JanSport in 1986. JanSport sits in VF's packs portfolio alongside Eastpak and Kipling.
When and where was JanSport founded?
In 1967 in Seattle, Washington, by Murray Pletz, his cousin Skip Yowell and seamstress Jan Lewis, whose first name the brand carries.
What does JanSport make?
Backpacks, bags and totes - carrying gear for outdoor use, school, travel and everyday journeys.
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